Eat my Thoughts

If you’re still upset about Triple J’s decision to move its Hottest 100 Countdown by a day, get over it. That was announced last year so surely it is time to stop living in the past, right?

Alright I make that comment a little facetiously, as I don’t think we get to decide what others find upsetting or that there is really a timeline on how long something can be upsetting for. But if you have asked Indigenous Australians to get over their opposition to a national day of celebration on the 26th of January, then perhaps you’ll appreciate the irony.

Judging from social media, there are plenty of people out there who haven’t just gotten over Triple J’s decision (it turns out getting over things isn’t actually so easy when you’re the one who has to do it), so it is little wonder that a number of radio stations and the Australian Conservatives are all having their alternative (cheap knock off) music countdowns on Australia Day.

The Tasmanian election hasn’t even been called, but the campaigns sure have begun. The Labor Party’s announcement that if elected, it would implement much needed poker machine reform started the de facto election race without any need for a formal starting gun. Perhaps aware that for many people, their policy is highly unpalatable, the Liberal Government seems content to let their donors/shareholders in the gambling industry prosecute much of the attacks on Labor’s policy.​Instead, the pre-campaign campaign (that’s not a typo) from the Liberals focuses a lot of their messaging around Tasmania’s economic upturn. A radio advertisement I heard recently asked me to compare the record of the Hodgman Liberal Government to that of the previous Labor Government.

​So in the past week I have seen and heard a number of stories in both print and radio media exclaiming with some shock about the amount of money spent on social welfare. Comparing Treasury data on the cost of government welfare with employment data, it is possible to make unsophisticated assertions about how many hours a week the average Australian worker is working to pay for it. And from this we get the deliberately evocative headlines and sound bites that the average Australian worker works three hours to pay for social welfare programs.

Now admittedly some of the assumptions of this process are highly open to interpretation, but I'm going to be generous and treat the claim as largely accurate; as even if this is the case there are several points that need to bee considered in this context.